• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

Is xscope worth the purchase?

jguns112 said:
Awesome. Google turning around on the strategies they pioneered.
Click to expand...


How do you mean? The 24 hr trial period? I think an hour would have been more appropriate, even 30 minutes. But I'm OK with that decision overall. You dont get to return bad Steam games, or other software. 15 mins is a bit tight though.

Still, personally, as a dev I'm pleased they are finally going to offer us some support besides telling us to try Ad revenue and up-selling our customers by constantly reminding them to "upgrade to the pro version."

Android has userbase that is accustomed to not paying for things, as evidenced by Google products and your views on browsers. This is a serious reason they dont attact as much dev work as the iPhone does, and why there are far fewer success stories for Android devs than iPhone ones.

Ad revenue is particulary difficult for startups to make work and requires the tenuous internet permission.

I'm deeply commited to the Android platform, but all I think when stuff like this comes up is "'bout damn time"
 
I understand that developers wanted less than a 24hr trial period, but 15 minutes is laughable. It's stupidly short. 1 hour should be the minimum period IMHO.
 
15 minutes only helps to keep people from buying. 24 hours may have been too long but 15 mins is not enough to test apps
 
15 mins > 0 mins.

Trial versions of the apps will fill the gap for apps that need more than a 15 minute window, and 15 mins keeps the game developers happy. Game development is huge for a mobile platform, and an hour or more makes it too easy to knock off substantial portions of a game in a sitting, then return it.

Game development attracts users which attracts money and fuels other development.

15 minutes is plenty of time for the vast majority of applications. Virtually any purpose-specific utility, app or game can be briefly evaluated in 15 minutes, and no other app market allows that kind of evaluation. The few apps that need longer to evaluate can publish trial versions.
 
15 minutes is not enough time for me to adequately determine whether or not an app is worth my money. Normally it takes about 5 minutes just to get the app up and running and I'm sorry but 10 minutes is not enough time to look at all of an apps features and see if it does what I want it to do.

Also I don't see how an hour is too long for game development. Either don't make your games so short or don't make them so boring that people will tire of them within an hour. I'll agree that 15 minutes is plenty of time for games in the line of angry birds or gem miner, but more sophisticated games take longer than 15 minutes to evaluate. In my opinion this would be much better than trial versions, because often times I'll just play or use a trial to avoid having to purchase an app. Gem Miner is a fun little game and I've considered buying the full version but instead I just played the free one until I was bored with it. Trial versions encourage this sort of behavior where if there was only the option of an hour trial I would have been forced to make the purchase if I wanted to play more.
 
Anyway, "Is xScope worth the purchase?".

Today, I would have to say no. The support forum seems to be dead, which is a real shame as this browser filled a gap in the market for a small, fast tabbed browser. And the "pin zoom" function is excellent. I'm sure some other browser developer will pick up pin zooming in the near future.

So now I'm looking for a browser to replace xScope as it does have a few bugs which don't look like they are ever going to be resolved.

It can be dangerous to buy an app from someone who develops and maintains it as a hobby. This seems to be a classic example. But, in the case of xScope, I would really like to be proved wrong.

Regards,
Jacko
 
What bugs? I've been using Xscope free for 6 months and never had a problem. The pinch-zoom, excellent rendering of mobile pages is the reason I use it and no other browser. Never saw a reason to buy it, I don't see ads, so why buy it?
 
I wouldn't buy it. I used to use it as my go to browser when it was still being updated. But now support has been dropped and emails aren't responded to. When a new version of Android comes out the dev releases some update that doesn't really do anything and says it's optimized and that's about it.
 
I have bought the paid version, but I don't use xscope anymore. I use Boat Browser, it's fantastic - very quick.
 
jacko9000 said:
The biggest bug is that xScope does not allow scrolling of areas within a web page. A page to use as an example is http://www.domedia.org/oveklykken/css-div-scroll.php
Click to expand...

tcat007 said:
Interesting. Which browsers support this?
Click to expand...

The problem is with WebKit on Android. Google was made aware of the scrolling problem back in March 2009 at http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2118 and indeed at that time there were no browsers which supported such scrollable areas, not even the stock browser. To this day, the stock browser on Gingerbread still does not support them. So the Firefox team have taken it upon themselves to implement a solution.

And so, to answer your question, the only browser I know of is the latest Firefox 14 whose nightly builds can be downloaded from http://nightly.mozilla.org/ . This version of Firefox does seem to be quite fast and I'm keeping an eye on it to see if it could become my regular browser.

But I'd rather keep using xScope, so I submitted a request to the xScope developer, explaining about the Firefox solution, but I haven't yet had a reply.
 
jacko9000 said:
Hi Aysiu,

As you are a "Senior Member", I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt and try Dolphin again. However, as I suspected, the scrolling does NOT work on Dolphin. Please can you try again and confirm this using the example page at CSS scroll area with overflow - DoMedia .

Thanks for your help.

Regards,
Jacko
Click to expand...
It works for me. What am I looking for, exactly? Do I have to copy and paste the code into an HTML page? Or are you saying the page you linked to directly is not supposed to display okay? Is there a screenshot I can post to convince you?

Not sure if it makes a difference, but I'm using Dolphin HD on a CDMA Galaxy Nexus. Maybe Dolphin doesn't work as well on other phone models or Android versions? Or maybe you're talking about Dolphin Mini?

Edit: I've attached a couple of screenshots from Dolphin. You don't see the actual scroll bar on the right side, but the scrolling does work.
 

Attachments

  • 13332310027101.jpg
    13332310027101.jpg
    31.9 KB · Views: 61
  • 13332309895640.jpg
    13332309895640.jpg
    31.9 KB · Views: 70
I just tested it in Browser and Chrome as well, and it works in both of those as well, but it also does not display the scroll bar on the right side. Scrolling does, however, still work.
 
aysiu said:
I just tested it in Browser and Chrome as well, and it works in both of those as well, but it also does not display the scroll bar on the right side. Scrolling does, however, still work.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply aysiu.

It looks like the scrolling has been fixed in Ice Cream Sandwich. The original bug report was for Gingerbread and it has still not been fixed.

So for those of you with Gingerbread, either use Firefox or avoid sites with scrolling areas in them.

Thanks for your help.

Regards,
Jacko
 
That clarifies things a bit. Dolphin, however, doesn't come with Ice Cream Sandwich. So does that mean Dolphin has a different version for Ice Cream Sandwich than for Gingerbread? Or that it's using the base preinstalled Browser's webkit to render things?
 
aysiu said:
That clarifies things a bit. Dolphin, however, doesn't come with Ice Cream Sandwich. So does that mean Dolphin has a different version for Ice Cream Sandwich than for Gingerbread? Or that it's using the base preinstalled Browser's webkit to render things?
Click to expand...

Dolphin uses Android's WebKit, so it should scroll these areas on ICS, but not on Gingerbread. But the ICS solution is still not satisfactory. There should be a scrollbar on the right hand side, as in desktop browsers. Google really needs to fix this and port it back to Android 2.x also.
 
Forgot to mention that Firefox is not based on WebKit, which is why it can provide this feature. I will try to look for other such browsers and I will report back with my findings.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom